In the past, conferences addressing market solutions to the climate crisis were attended by professionals with ‘sustainability’ in their titles. But we’ve begun to realize that sustainability is everyone’s responsibility, and the audience has expanded. In fact, this year’s VERGE 20 (register at this link with Nori's 15% off discount code) is more accessible than ever, welcoming anyone who’s interested to learn more about sustainable food systems and carbon removal.
Jim Giles is the Conference Chair of VERGE Food and VERGE Carbon at GreenBiz. On this bonus episode of the podcast, Jim joins Ross to discuss the upcoming GreenBiz conference, VERGE 20, sharing some of the notable sessions and speakers on topics like purchasing carbon offsets and scaling regenerative agriculture.
Jim explains how VERGE will look different this year, describing how his team has pivoted to a virtual format, and what they are doing to recreate 1:1 connections among the 10K projected attendees! Listen in for insight around the growing interest in sustainability and find out how YOU can be a part of the VERGE 20 online conference.
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Resources
VERGE 20 Nori Discount Link
Jim Giles on Carbon Removal Newsroom
Google’s Recent Climate Commitments Announcement
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: [music] Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, another alumnus on the show for a bonus episode, conference chair of Verge Food and Verge Carbon. Hi, Jim. Hey, Ross. Thanks for having me on. Great to have you back. We did this last year and we really liked going to Verge 19. It was a lot of fun, met a lot of people that we only knew digitally, knew people we didn’t know prior. Great presentations. Alessandra got the pitch at Verge Accelerate. It was a fantastic event. And so we’re talking today about what you’re doing now for Verge 20 and also under weird circumstances with COVID too.
So what is Verge 20? What is going to happen this year?
Jim Giles: Yeah, well, we’re doing it, but it’s all online, which is, it’s a sad thing, you know, we’re so sorry not to be able to do it in person like you. It was just amazing to sort of bring the whole community together and to meet all these people we normally only talk to by email. So we’re really sorry that we can’t do that. And hopefully we will in 2021. The flip side of all that is that we’re expecting a lot more people. It’s a big ask to say to someone, come out to the West Coast for three days of conference, pay for a flight in a hotel.
It’s not that cheap to attend depending on when you buy it and what kind of ticket you qualify for. It might cost, say, $2,000, for example, to attend the Verge that we did last year. This year, you don’t have to go anywhere. Tickets currently cost $249 and that’s for a whole week of programming. So the flip side is that we are expecting many more people and hopefully more geographically diverse as well. People from Europe and Asia that wouldn’t normally be able to attend.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s amazing. I’ve seen this number in various pieces of documentation, but you’re looking at something like maybe 10,000 attendees, participants.
Jim Giles: Yeah, that is what we’re projecting based on the attendance we’ve seen the other digital events that we’ve done and the rate at which people are registering. So there’s two tiers and the 10,000 number applies to both tiers combined. There’s a passway We don’t pay anything and you get to see everything we do on the main stage. So all the keynotes and that’s completely free. And then there’s the 249 all access pass that I mentioned previously, which gets you access to all the breakout sessions where we do these kind of deep dives.
And the 10,000 number is like what we expect across both those ticket types.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that’s terrific. And if you are interested in attending, and we’re going to dig into the details of who’s speaking and how this will all work, there is a 15% discount code that Nori has. So if you are interested at any point listening to this show, you really want to go check out the show notes, click on the link, and it’ll send you the page with our discount code input, or input it, I should say, and then you are good to go. Who is speaking? What kinds of... Do you prefer the term Puppet Master?
The Puppet Master of Burge Carbon? What are you orchestrating over there? What kind of events is speaking? Puppet Master is good.
Jim Giles: I can work with that. So we’re kind of going over some of the stuff that we did last year topic-wise. Obviously, a lot has moved on in the year. And we’ve also expanded the range of things that we’re doing. So we’re doing tracks on carbon tech and capture and storage. What we’re doing more of is carbon market. Yeah. And this is a role that we’re really excited to play, which is to say, well, look, come here and we can kind of demystify this process of buying offsets and carbon removals and help you get involved in that market in a way that you can be confident that your money is being well spent.
So that’s something we did a bit of last year, but we’re doing a lot more of this year.
Ross Kenyon: It makes sense. Your primary audience here, I’m going to read into this, let me know if this is not correct, but you work with a lot of sustainability professionals who are in the corporate world. And trying to make some of those connections and spark discussions around how companies are dealing with negative emissions or offsetting or even just environmental commitments with regard to clean energy, procurement, or the circular economy, etc. Is that halfway to the mark?
Jim Giles: Yeah, that’s I would say that is exactly halfway. So we do have this core audience of sustainability professionals. But what I think is amazing about Verge and which I loved last year was to see people who don’t have sustainability in their job title. Come to the conference and get involved in discussions. So I’ll give you an example. We did a session last year on carbon negative building materials. And we had folks from Solidia and people that know about mass timber and things like that. And then when we got to the questions, it was wonderful because we had a whole bunch of people in the audience.
I didn’t really expect to be there. People that worked in facilities and procurement, say big tech companies like LinkedIn and Facebook, they were putting up their hands and saying, hey, we’ve got construction projects. How can we buy your stuff? How can we make better decisions about these construction projects? Emphasizes a trend I’m super excited about, which is that sustainability is becoming everyone’s responsibility. It’s not just chief sustainability officer’s job. It’s like all of us require a certain level of literacy around sustainability in order to do our jobs effectively. And we’re seeing that result in people from outside who wouldn’t call themselves sustainability professionals are coming to verge and engaging in what we’re doing.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, yes. That’s a terrific trend. Why do you think that has happened? I’m sure that’s been different from your previous experience in this space. Is it just evolving that much?
Jim Giles: Well, I think it’s multiple things. Partly, it’s just you cannot ignore it anymore. So you may not have had an interest in sustainability and maybe you wished it was someone else’s problem. That’s not really an option anymore. With things like it’s so visible, the changes that are happening because of greenhouse gases, that Not everyone, but many more people feel like they have to play a role in dealing with that situation. And then, of course, that’s also translating into the bottom line. We’ve seen so much action this year from both big investment groups, VC firms, even small investors going all in on ESG stocks and seeing them do really well.
That there’s pressure coming from the top as well from shareholders for companies to do more. And I think all these things are combining to generate this kind of pressure on incorporating sustainability thinking into whatever your job is.
Ross Kenyon: Who is speaking? What kind of events? Maybe you can give people a little tease, a little razzle-dazzle to whet their appetite for attendance.
Jim Giles: Yeah, totally. So we’re kicking off actually with a session I’m super excited about. It’s called the Buyer’s Guide, an introduction to purchasing carbon offsets. And with this session, what we’re trying to be is like the consumer reports of carbon offsets. So we’re going to try and help. Help people really understand what’s involved in making smart decisions about carbon avoidance and removal. And that session is being run by two people. I’m so excited they agree to do it. Jonathan Goldberg, who heads up a firm called Carbon Direct, Which helps businesses make smart decisions about removals and offsets.
And also Anna Escua, who heads the carbon program at Google. You probably saw their announcement, I think, this week or the week before. And she has just done some amazing work in terms of... Fantastic due diligence around which offset projects really deliver results. So they’ll be sort of introducing people to this and I’m hoping help people become smart consumers on that front. What else do we have that’s really exciting? So we have a two part session. And so this session is kind of a collaboration between Verge Carbon and Verge Food.
It’s a two-part session. We’ll be looking at what we know about Soil health and what the science is telling us about the ability of soils to sequester carbon. And then in the second part, we’ll be looking at what are the business models that we can use to scale up regenerative agriculture and draw down carbon. Great people in that session. So, you know, just to highlight a couple, Robin O’Brien from Replant Capital. They have these kind of innovative financing instruments that link payments to soil health. And I find that really interesting.
Steele Lawrence from Grow. Which is an offshoot of the Farmers Business Network where they’re working to drive finance from companies that want to help draw down carbon. They’re helping to drive that money into agricultural projects. So obviously like a close overlap with what you’re doing there at Nori. So yeah, I’m super excited by just like the volume of activity in this space. I’m going to have four speakers in that session on business models and regenerative agriculture. I could easily have 10. There’s just so much going on there.
Ross Kenyon: That’s the most exciting part of this is we are always not lamenting. And this comes up so many times on the podcast of wanting this space to grow. And it really is. It’s surprising that I will look at events like this and say, Oh, wow, they’re doing something. Oh, there’s some new company I haven’t heard of. And we really, really need this as fast as possible, as soon as possible. And in many ways, even if sometimes it’s tempting to feel Competitive about it, there’s really no time for it. We really need as much brain power and elbow grease as possible in there.
So yeah, it’s fantastic to see all of these different events.
Jim Giles: Yeah, I think that’s great to hear. And I was really struck by thinking back to Verge Carbon last year when I really wanted to do a session on ocean sequestration, but I basically struggled to fill it out. I mean, I know that there were some great projects out there. But it just didn’t feel like there was critical mass in terms of putting a session together. And I went back and looked again a couple of months. And it was just so wonderful to see new projects having popped up in the last 12 months and to know that there was going to be a great session.
In fact, a session where I’d probably have to be turning down speakers who could easily be there. So the progress, the pace at which this field is evolving is so exciting.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s hard to keep up with, as we’re fond of saying. It’s good. I’m happy whenever I find out something I didn’t already know about previously, it’s a blessing kind of scenario.
Jim Giles: It’s good.
Ross Kenyon: Well, was your job difficult this year with COVID or was it easier than I might think?
Jim Giles: It was definitely hard and not specifically my job, but the company as a whole, really the transition that we had to make when we decided not to run the in-person conference, to pivot to being a digital conference, to figure out partly the We know that is a big reason why people attend events. Settled on a platform called Hopin. Some of my colleagues did amazing weeks and weeks of due diligence and settled on Hopin, which we used for our circular economy conference a few weeks ago. It’s great. Features these really fun networking features.
There’s one great Feature you can run in the break where you can just do kind of networking chat roulette. You just say, connect me with someone else at this conference and you get given, I believe it’s two and a half minutes to talk and that’s it. You get kicked out of the room after two and a half minutes. Obviously you can connect more permanently if you wish to. And that was so fun. I tried it and I just bumped into a whole bunch of like really interesting people and ended up exchanging emails and actually ended up writing about some of the stuff that people sent me.
So we’ll be doing that again at Verge. And I would recommend anyone who attends to try that. It is good fun.
Ross Kenyon: Those sound like fun. These tools are definitely getting more sophisticated as we are more and more homebound. Well, Jim, where can people learn more?
Jim Giles: You can go to our website, events. greenbiz. com, or just greenbiz. com, in fact, and you will see a link to Verge there. And you can dive in, you can check out the program. Of course, there’s Verge Food and Carbon I’ve talked about. There’s There’s also Verge Energy, Transport and the Circular Economy all under one roof. You can check out our Accelerate event. That’s also super exciting. The Fast Pitch Competition, the finals of which will take place on the main stage. And if you’re interested in regenerative ag and anything else to do really with carbon sequestration on the food side, do check out Food Weekly.
It’s a weekly email newsletter that I write. It’s completely free. And you can sign up for that as well at our website.
Ross Kenyon: I just saw that on your Twitter profile. I need to sign up for that myself. I would like to see what’s catching your eye out there, Jim. That would be great. I’d love you to sign up and give me your feedback as well. Okay, I’ll do that. And also, if you’re interested in attending Verge 20, there’s a link in our show notes with Nori’s discount code for 15% off. You should definitely click that. And maybe I’ll see you there. Maybe I’ll end up in one of these rooms with you networking just randomly.
Who knows? Well, thanks for being here, Jim. Thanks, Ross, so much for having me on again. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Happy to catch up and happy that you’re able to weather this COVID storm. And if you’d like the show, not only should you try to go to Verge 20 if you’re able, but if you could write this review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, it’s always much appreciated. Stitcher as well has that option. Tell a friend. Tell a friend who’s maybe on the job hunt or looking to broaden their skills with regard to sustainability, circular economy, carbon removal, clean energy...
Transport, a whole bunch of good things. Have them check out Verge 20. And thank you so much for listening.
